Apple is NOT The World's Most Innovative Company. Here is Why.

Apple regularly comes top of the polls that score the world’s most innovative companies. Here is the main reason why not being the most innovative bodes well for the Apple share price.

In the past year, Apple has topped Fast company’s -for walking the talk(?) – “Apple definitely has the keys–because where it goes, everyone follows.” It topped Fortune’s most admired for innovation.

And Boston Consulting Group/BusinessWeek had it number one in their global list. The Forbes list of the world’s most innovative is a notable exception placing Apple fifth

Apple has been innovative and disruptive. It reshaped the smartphone industry while Nokia toyed with its Symbian OS. It gave us the Ultra, with MacAir, and it finally got tablets right with the iPad. That run ended in 2010, too long ago for the kudos to continue accruing to Apple.

But leaving the time lag aside, there’s a good reason for not considering Apple to be the world’s most innovative company. And that’s simple. Companies that disrupt need what Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits,authors of the recently published Lean Entrepreneur, described earlier as a“sustaining” period.

The market needs to recognize that disruptors go into hibernation and rightly exploit what they have created before they disrupt again, if ever.

The lack of cognizance of this is affecting interpretations of Apple’s performance. But Apple has been losing innovation kudos – rightly so – for some time, if your reference point is the general public.

In the graph below you can see Apple’s reputation for innovation in decline from 2010 onwards. At the beginning of 2011 Google was regarded in social media channels as being as innovative as Apple.

But Google too had been through a trough just before, after the failures of Wave and Buzz. And that is the most important reason why Apple should not be regarded as the world’s most innovative company. Google came back with a 30% share price rise.

The reality is innovators need time in the doldrums. They need their relative failures (Maps, Siri). And they need time to reap the rewards of disruption.

They can sustain those failures if they switch off the disruption button, or at least tone it down. They become sustaining innovators, improving the basics of their product offerings (Phone 5) and services (iTunes in the Cloud).

But just as Google came back with Glass and the driverless car, and updated their innovation reputation (and share price), so too Apple will return. Cook promised as much to investors this week. At that point it will deserve the plaudits once more. In the meantime the most innovative tag is a millstone, forcing its share price down despite its enviable economic success.

We and the markets need to embrace the idea of sustaining innovation, periods of incremental change and relative failure. They are what make champions like Google and Apple tick. [Forbes]

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WePay Launches iOS App to Allow Customers to Accept Bank Cards And Issue Invoices on the Move

Online payments startup WePay is expanding into new territory today with the launch of a new native app for iOS that allows small businesses to invoicing and charge credit cards on the go.

The Y Combinator-backed startup originally formed to make it easier for groups to collect money and make payments together. But recently it pivoted slightly to become ultra-simple platform for businesses to collect and manage payments online. It’s added support for event registration and ticketing, custom invoicing, donations, and e-commerce. Last year, the startup rolled out a white-label payments API and lowered its prices to court third-party developers and debuted an easy way to embed in-line payments.

While Square, PayPal and many others, are focused on allowing merchants and individuals to accept and swipe credit cards, WePay’s app is centered around more of a niche area—allowing those small businesses who send invoices to be able to accept credit cards within the app. Both invoicing and credit card processing cost 2.9% + .30¢ per transaction, and all cards are accepted.

The invoicing aspect is key, says founder Bill Clerico. The user experience of the app is really centered around businesses, such as marketers, contractors, designers and others, who send professional invoices on the go, and want to also accept payments via these invoices. In terms of credit card acceptance, the app just asks for the user to manually input the credit card info and the card is charged.

Clerico explains that WePay looked at developing hardware but didn’t think that developing this was the right fit for the company at the time, Over time, WePay may explore this area, he adds.

WePay has raised a total of $20 million since being founded in 2009, including a $10 million round led by Ignition Partners that it announced in May. Other investors include Highland Capital Partners, August Capital, and angels such as Max Levchin, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and Steve Chen.

The ability to take credit cards on the go (and invoice) seems like a natural extension for WePay. The company has been growing steadily, processing hundreds of millions of dollars in payments annually, and adding more than 1,000 active merchants per week. This new app should help add even more businesses to the mix. [TechCrunch]

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Quick Charge 2.0 Can Charge Devices 75% Faster Says Qualcomm

If there’s one big complaint that I hear from everyone in the mobile industry, it’s that our devices simply don’t hold a charge long enough. Qualcomm, NVIDIA and plenty of other companies are trying to address that issue by creating processors that consume less juice, but let’s face it: we’re asking more from our devices than ever, and the battery is going to drain as we use them more frequently.

Qualcomm’s looking to address this problem on a different front, by allowing you to charge your devices up to 75% faster with its new Quick Charge 2.0 solution. Quick Charge 1.0 made its debut last year and is built into 70 devices, but it only charges them 40% faster than competitors. Quick Charge 2.0 is part of the company’s Snapdragon 800 processor (but it can also be added separately at the component level) and is also part of AC/DC wall chargers.

To put the faster charge in perspective, Qualcomm said that it was able to fully charge a device in 3 hours that normally takes more than 7 hours to juice up.

“We anticipate that devices and wall chargers with Quick Charge 2.0 will be available for purchase by early 2014; all smartphones and tablets with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor will have Quick Charge 2.0. Snapdragon 800 processors are an entire system-on-a-chip and feature a CPU, GPU, DSP, LTE Modem and much more, enabling UltraHD video, high-end 3D gaming, 7.1 surround sound, and up to 55 Megapixel image captures, so being able to quick charge means less time charging and more time doing,” Qualcomm said.

Sounds amazing, hopefully we can play with the technology soon. [TechnoBuffalo]

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